Possibly one of the reasons why this great romance made so small an impression was because it appeared at an unpropitious time. The sower sowed the seed; but the thorns of Reade and Trollope sprang up and choked them. These two novelists were in full action; and they kept the public busy. Realism was strong in the market; people did not know then, as we do now, that The _Cloister and the Hearth_ was worth all the rest of Charles Reade put together. Had _Lorna Doone_ appeared toward the end of the century, when the Romantic Revival was in full swing, it would have received a royal welcome. But how many would have recognised its superiority to the tinsel stuff of those recent days, full of galvanised knights and stuffed chatelaines? For _Lorna_ belongs to a class of fiction with which we were flooded in the nineties, though, compared with the ordinary representative of its kind, it is as a star to a glow-worm. Readers then enjoyed impossible characters, whose talk was mainly of "gramercy" and similar curiosities, for they had the opportunity to "revel in the glamour of a bogus antiquity." But an abundance of counterfeits does not lower the value of the real metal; and _Lorna_ is a genuine coin struck from the mint of historical romance. In the original preface its author modestly said:-- "This work is called a 'romance,' because the incidents, characters, time, and scenery are alike romantic. And in shaping this old tale, the writer neither dares, nor desires, to claim for it the dignity or cumber it with the difficulty of an historic novel." In warmth and colour, in correct visualisation, and in successful imitation of the prose of a bygone day (which no one has ever perfectly accomplished), it ranks not very far below the greatest of all English historical romances, _Henry Esmond_. _Lorna Doone_ is practically one more illustration of Single-Speech Hamilton. After its appearance, its author wrote and published steadily for thirty years; but the fact remains that not only is _Lorna_ his best-known work, but that his entire reputation hangs upon it. Many of his other stories are good, notably _Cripps the Carrier_ and _Perlycross_; the latter has a most ingenious plot; but these two now peacefully repose with their mates in undisturbed slumber at dusty library corners. They had an initial sale because they came from the hand that created _Lorna_; then they were lost in the welter of ephemeral literature. Mr. Blackmore offered his buyers all sorts of wares, but, after a momentary examination, they declined what was "just as good," and returned to their favourite, which, by the way, was never his; he ranked it third among his productions.